Al Rasheed has been to a few Field Day events stretching back into last year. For 2019, he’s very excited to see what’s on tap for Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe. He’ll be joining what he calls the “Dream Team” of delegates for the event (we’ll leave it to Al to tell us which one is Christian Laettner). He continues to be amazed at how participating in Field Day events has opened new doors and opportunities. We’re just glad to have such an insightful and knowledgable delegate around the table.

John Herbert was at our Networking Field Day Exclusive event with Cisco’s Service Provider business unit this week, and he felt their presentations were excellent. They delved into segment routing, zero touch provisioning, OpenConfig support for their IOS XR platform, and more. If you want to catch all the technical deep dives, full video of the event has been posted. Check it out!

Phil Gervasi always has his radar up to detect marketing FUD from IT companies. But at Networking Field Day last year, a lot of what he heard from Cisco about SD-WAN rang true. The category is hardly new, and Cisco’s acquisition of Viptela is 2017 validated it as an area of focus for the company. For Cisco, they tie mass SD-WAN adoption to cloud adoption, with an overall theme of how to on-ramp to and manage a multi-cloud topology. Phil runs through what they presented and how it enables that for organizations.

John Herbert is back on the blogging path in early 2019 and he’s excited! He’ll be starting off the year with a Networking Field Day Exclusive from Cisco’s Service Provider group. You can watch the event along with John on January 15th, or check out his coverage of what he saw afterward. We’re looking forward to both!

Max Mortillaro will be attending Cisco Live Europe, and is looking forward to attending Tech Field Day Extra sessions at the event. In past years, he’s focused on Cisco Hyperflex, but this year he has a different focus. He’ll be looking to get more details on Cisco’s strategy this year, especially compared to some of the renewed competitors in their markets.

We’re happy to see that Al Rasheed was accepted as a Cisco Champion for 2019. In this post, he directly sites the influence of attending Networking Field Day for this accomplishment. We’re just glad Al was able to attend the event, and we’re hoping to see him back in 2019.

Cisco was one of the companies that presented at our inaugural Security Field Day event in December. Tom Hollingsworth breaks down what he saw at the event from Cisco Duo, their authentication platform. This provides intelligent multifactor authentication. It does this by not assuming endpoints are secure, enforcing the latest firmware, and supporting geofencing and time zone awareness. This allows you to build policy enforcement into your 2FA from the ground up.

Orhan Ergun looks at Cisco’s SD-WAN efforts, which since acquiring Viptela in 2017 have been recognized by Gartner as Leaders in their Magic Quadrant. For Orhan, the strength of Cisco’s approach to SD-WAN is allowing it to run directly on IOS-based devices, bringing in new features with software updates. He also digs deep into the feature parity with other SD-WAN solutions, and the overall value proposition for enterprises.

Even though J Wolfgang Goerlich is stuck in traffic, that doesn’t mean he can’t put together some great security content. In this video, he considers the influence of Doug Engelbart, and how we can use collective intelligence to augment cyber security practices, particularly with automation. At Security Field Day, he saw Cisco take this approach with Cisco Threat Response.

Paul Snyder was one of the delegates invited to the inaugural Security Field Day earlier this month. This was his first time at a Field Day event, he found it to be one of the best professional experiences he’s ever had. He found the event separates itself from others in the industry, because the delegates have total candor and freedom to express how they truly feel about the presenting companies. Maintaining this independence is critical for maintaining constructive dialogues.

Phil Gervasi is still haunted by memories of the Cisco 5760 Wireless LAN Controller. So it was with that in mind that he looks at Cisco’s new WLCs they presented at Networking Field Day, the 9300 and 9800 series. Phil thinks these can be successful due to their IOS-XE programmability and their ability to be deployed in racks or in the cloud as virtual appliances. Phil doesn’t think Cisco is repeating the issues of the 5760, and wants to start building them out in a lab soon.

In this post, notable Canadian and Networking Field Day delegate Rob Coote digs into the Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controller from Cisco, positioned as their next-generation wireless platform. At Networking Field Day, Cisco highlighted three key improvements from previous Aironet products: Always-on, security, and the ability to deploy anywhere. Rob think the overall popularity of Catalyst 9k switches should provide a good basis for the success of the wireless platform.

Gian Paolo Boarina heard a lot about Cisco ACI at Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe this year. This has come in handy since he’s been migrating traditional switches to Cisco ACI fabric. In this post, he looks at what exactly is ACI from the perspective of a different roles, including networking, security, and DevOps. Overall in working with Cisco ACI, Gian has found he’s needed less time configuring switches, and more time focusing on business intent.

Cisco spent the bulk of their Networking Field Day presentation discussing recent updates to SD-WAN. Pete Welcher digs into the presentation in this blog post. For Pete, the big news of the presentation was Cisco bringing improved security to SD-WAN, with firewalls and other security features now included with Viptela SD-WAN. Pete sees this as the key to broadening SD-WAN into more diverse designs and topologies.

Kevin Blackburn breaks down the release of Cisco’s new Catalyst 9800 series wireless LAN controller. Kevin is impressed that this isn’t a single appliance, but a true platform that can run in the cloud, on a switch, or on an on-premises appliance. The Catalyst 9800 series WLC are all based on IOS-XE code, providing modularity and flexibility. Cisco presented on this at Networking Field Day earlier this month, so be sure to check out their full video for a deep dive.

It’s always great to hear the perspective of first time Tech Field Day delegates. Yusuf Emre Özensoy came to his first event last month, and shared a little bit about his experience. For him, what stood out not just being an attendee of the event, but being invited into a wider family as a part of it. He also enjoyed all the technical deep dives from DriveScale, Cisco, Oracle, Dell EMC, and Hammerspace.

Inspired by Cisco’s presentation at Tech Field Day last month, Ethan Banks uses the classic “fast, cheap, good: pick 2” device for considering running Cisco ACI in the cloud. By moving this switching management plane from on-prem to Cloud APIC, Ethan doesn’t see a performance bottleneck since this will all be in cloud-native constructs. Ultimately cost may be the issue for some organizations.

The inimitable Pete Welcher returns as a Networking Field Day delegate next month. In this post, he previews the presenting companies. The roster is stacked for the event, including networking stalwarts like Cisco and Riverbed, emerging startups like Barefoot Network, Apstra, and Illumio, and those that Pete wants to see more from like Silver Peak, Kentik, and Bluecat Networks. You can catch all their presentation on our live stream during the event.

Jim Palmer wants his readers to know that Meraki’s FAST-ACK as presented at Mobility Field Day last month isn’t the same as fracking. Instead, this patented technology designed to speed up content from a remote device. He digs into the use of ACK in a traditional Ethernet network, and how Meraki is innovating on this for wireless networks.

In this post, Scott Lester considers some of the challenges with current connectivity approaches to the remote office. Cellular access is common, but makes it hard to maintain an enterprise security posture at all times. At Mobility Field Day last month, Cisco showed how the emergence of 5G might be the ideal solution.